LAX FlyAway bus coming to Torrance in 2015

The city of Torrance should have nonstop bus service to Los Angeles International Airport by the middle of 2015, airport officials said this week.

Torrance is slated to receive service via the LAX FlyAway Bus, which now operates to four locations in Los Angeles — Westwood, Van Nuys, Union Station and a light rail station near Jefferson Boulevard and La Brea Avenue. The plan is to have buses operate from a more than $20 million transit center in Torrance currently being designed.

Los Angeles World Airports, which runs LAX, is required to have nine FlyAway buses by 2015 under a settlement agreement it reached in February 2006 with Los Angeles County, three cities and a Westchester-based community group. The settlement allowed LAX to move forward with a project to separate the distance between two parallel runways on the south side of the airfield, which was completed in 2008. The entities wanted the buses in part to improve air quality at and near the airport.

Under plans outlined at Monday’s Los Angeles Board of Airport Commissioners meeting, Torrance is to come online after Santa Monica, Hollywood and Orange, all of which should start in 2014. Airport officials told the seven-member airport commission that ridership for the Torrance branch is expected to be about 80,000 per year once the market “matures.”

Van Nuys, with a one-way fare of $8, is by far the most popular of the current routes, with almost 900,000 annual passengers. Union Station is second with about 475,000 passengers.

The Van Nuys route, serving the San Fernando Valley has been around the longest, having started in 1975.

“The Van Nuys Flyaway has actually been quite robustly successful from the standpoint of pretty consistent ridership,” LAWA Executive Director Gina Marie Lindsey said. “I am guessing that when that stipulation was put into the settlement agreement, there was an anticipation that if we implemented other routes they might be just as robustly successful and that has not proven to be the case. Union Station has very good ridership but we have struggled with other locations.”

Lindsey said it’s not clear how much the Torrance route will cost. Passengers using the current routes pay $6 to $10 each way. Whether parking fees also will be charged in Torrance is still unclear. At other FlyAway locations, parking fees range from $4 to $11 a day.

“We are attempting to price the product in a way that will allow us to get as close as possible to meeting costs,” Lindsey said.